The Rangers Kit Launch - Tom Beahon part 2, August 2020

And that says away. If you just give me a wee second, I'll just go and have a wee look at some of the questions. So it shouldn't be too long. I'll just get off and try and finish. Nobody funny though. Sorry, with a few technical issues there, so back and rolling in.

Yeah, I know. In the grand scheme of things, there's worse things that can happen, but equally you're absolutely right. When fans part with their hard-earned cash, they want the product and they want it as quickly as possible. The training kit, there was some early stage problems. I'll be completely honest with you, it sold a lot more quickly than we anticipated. We do a lot of this in a very numerically led way. Without boring you with too much detail, it essentially says, okay, if you can sell 50,000 jerseys for the home kit that quickly, the away should broadly sell X percent of that, the training kit should sell X. Where the challenges arise is if one particular colorway of the training kit, which I think this season has been the navy training kit, is particularly popular and you see a surge in demand for that particular product. There's certain products that we've got coming down the pipeline, without giving too much away, that we're anticipating may receive a surge in demand. But the training kit wasn't one that we earmarked as one that was going to absolutely fly off the shelves. So they may be slightly slower than normal. Apologies for fans that may be waiting for those. But even for those that are waiting slightly longer than normal, I would hope, and I'm always conscious of over-promising, but I'd hope it's no more than a couple of days, which again I know is not perfect, so apologies. Hopefully it's not too much longer. I was speaking to another Premier League team and he said they've had a number of issues with delivery. That's of course not an excuse, but it's not a unique challenge either. I think all we can do is work through them as quickly as we possibly can, which we are doing.

Yeah, no, that's an important part of the next stage, if you like, Mark. As you can imagine, priority number one was the replica and training kits. We knew that was an undertaking and it absolutely has not disappointed. It's been all of that and more. So priority number one is to work through all of those things before we get too far ahead of ourselves on another product and merch. However, like you say, we're making really good progress on those areas. Very quickly, attention will be turning to how do we kit out that store with the best possible quality of product. You mentioned some of them there, and I know the guys have got work already and ideas well underway around taking this club's product offering. I think dog collars, pet stuff, stuff for the golf course, stuff you can wear to work, a really broad range of accessories, all these sorts of things. Between now, let's call it September, between September and December, we'll be dropping those into the store on a periodic basis, which again will hopefully be really exciting for the fans. The goal is to get as much of that prepared in advance of Christmas, which as I said earlier is the challenge we've set for ourselves to have as much as possible sorted by then.

That's exactly it, it really is. I don't want to sound like a broken record here, but Castore is a challenger brand. We can't go head to head with the Nike, Adidas, Pumas of this world, replicate what they do and compete with them because frankly they're far bigger and more experienced than us. Where we can compete with them is by being more innovative, creative, and doing things differently. Preparing products explicitly or exclusively for a Black Friday launch is a really good example. Again, I don't want to give too much away because the plans are still in a fairly early stage, but what I can say is that is absolutely our intention this season to do things differently from other football clubs and other big brands, and give fans the products they want, really high quality products, in a really exciting way. So something about Black Friday will absolutely form part of those plans.

The intention, Mark, is that anything that the players or the coaching staff wear will be available to the fans. So that's the intention. The only caveat to that is that priority number one is making sure that all of those pre-orders, all of those early orders of the playing and replica kit, are all sorted as quickly as possible. Once we've got those products in the hands of the fans, that's when we'll turn our focus to the broader product offering. But the intention is that the fans get everything that the players have access to. So in terms of what we could call the pro kit, that will become increasingly available.

Absolutely. Having the fans' ideas is always incredibly valuable, it really is. I can't promise that all of those ideas are going to get filtered into the products for the coming months, just purely because of the lead times and how long it takes to produce these things. But getting that feedback is really valuable. And like I said earlier, going forward, looking ahead into next season, that's when that feedback is going to really come into its own. But again, like I said, we want to be different to the big brands who do things in a very standardized, one-size-fits-all way.

Sorry Mark, yep, I can hear you now mate.

Yeah, I mean, I did just pick it up there. For Castore, Mark, as I've said already, we need to differentiate ourselves and stand out and be different to those big brands. One of the clear ways in my opinion that we can do that is by genuinely listening to the fans' feedback and taking it on board. That's not to overpromise and say that it's going to be filtered into every single product, but certainly going forward, hopefully for the rest of this season, some of the products we've got planned, and certainly going into the anniversary next season, we really want to take that fan feedback on board. So in all honesty, the sooner they can feed that into us, the better.

Massive milestone, Mark. When we entered this partnership, there were a number of things we knew were going to be incredibly important. You said it already, the flagship home jersey, watching the players walk out wearing the Castore logo on their chest for the first time was a very special moment, as I said on the Rangers TV interview. And clearly one of those big milestones is reopening the shop. As you said earlier, I think anyone that has any awareness of Rangers Football Club knows not only how important that shop has been historically, but also, to be completely honest, the challenges maybe that the shop has faced in more recent years. So again, we've internally at Castore talked a lot about a new era, challenging ourselves to look forward rather than look back. It's not always possible, but certainly as much as we can with this partnership, that is where the excitement really comes in. I don't think there's a better example of that new era opportunity than with the reopening of the shop. So I'll be there tomorrow. I believe there's going to be a number of people from the club there as well. So very, very excited. But equally, I think in my opinion, the way of viewing it is that tomorrow is day one. We've got a long-term partnership with Rangers. Hopefully, and there's obviously a broader context to this, but hopefully the world is going to get back to some semblance of normality in the coming months, and we'll be able to welcome far more fans, like I said, seven days a week. So tomorrow is a special moment for sure, but really there's a hell of a lot of hard work still ahead to make sure that, as you've said, we've got the right product offering in there for Rangers fans and that they can access that store whenever they want, seven days a week and all the rest of it. To take it back to what it used to be and used to represent for the fans, that is something that excites me hugely.

I certainly hope so, Mark. Certainly hope so. Thank you very much for having me, mate. Appreciate it.